the city, technically still part of

A sordid story of fi

PSST, YOU want to hear a
real filthy, disgusting, sick-
ening, messy story?

It is the story of Toronto and
ils mysterious vanishing mountain
of garbage.

For openers, you have to
understand that it has been years
since anybody seriously referred
to Toronto as The City That
Works.

lacreasingly, the great lumber-
ing quasi-city state with its con-
centration of about four million
human beings on the edge of a
lake that nobody dares swim in is
looking like an urban Gulliver
pinned to the ground by an army
of Lilliputian bureaucrats.

Politicians have been shouting
“This way!” and “That way!” over
the “garbage crisis” for a decade,
and something like $130 million
has been spent looking for a place
to put Toronto’s garbage when the
existing landfill sites fill up.

Amazingly, after alt that time
and money, not a single shovelful
of dirt has been dug up to build a
new dump. It’s a Waiting For
Godor kind of situation, with
entire politica! careers coming and
going, fortunes being won and
lost, and ncthing changing.

Take the poor old provincial
NDP under Bob Rac, for instance.
They made a determined effort to
come to terms with the garbage
nightmare, but only shot them-
selves in the foot.

They got wiped out in the last
election in part because they tried

to build three megadumps in the

rich agricultural beit of farmland
and horse ranches to the north of

Bob
Hunter

strictly
personal

the Greater Toronto Area.

The NDP's idea was that there
was a moral dimension to garbage
disposal. Big city people should
not be entitled to dump their
garbage on poor folks oui in the
country.

Instead, the garbage should be
disposed of in Toronto's “own
backyard.”

To that end, they set up a gar-
gantuan bureaucracy called the
Iaterim Waste Authority (TWA).
which turned out to have no
authority, was a waste of time,
and was very interim indeed.

The trouble with the NDP's
noble view was that the “back
yard” turned out to be somebody's
farm instead of the suburbs or
anywhere downtown. It wasn’t all
that different trom shipping it to
the moon.

So far as city folk were con-
cerned, it was still somewhere out
in the middle of the boonies, and
that’s all that mattered, But the
folks on the farms felt otherwise
and rallied behind the provincial

a “MOST :
"BEAUTIFUL

Tory party under Mike Harris,
who promised to trash the IWA,
which he promptly did upon get-
ting elected.

A wonderful moment for
democracy — but a sad day for
the taxpayers who shelled out $70
million on that one exercise in
futility alone.

The killing of the IWA has
meant that Toronto is back where
it was before the NDP came to
power, namely with no garbage
disposal plan at all.

For their part. the Ontario
Tories are sawing away in the
backrooms, trying to remove the
requirements that landfill sites
have to go through an environ-
mental assessment at all.

Basically, they are washing
their hands of the problem. saying
that it's up to the municipalities,
including Metro Toronto, to salve
the garbage crisis.

In the meantime, something
peculiar has happened.

Even though Metro Toronte
produces an estimated one million
tonnes of waste per year, the stuff
keeps vanishing somehow.

There undoubtedly is a garbage
crisis, but where has afl the
garbage gone? If the Malthusian
predictions of the ‘70s had come

Nancy Farran
Investment Advisor

~ 10 MINUTE . cee a.
ae

aR ING DRIVE DED SITS. :

Sunday, December 17, 1995 — North Shore News — 7

true, the CN Tower would be up
to its knees in black and green
plastic garbage bags by now.

But something culled the
Recession came along, suddenly
reducing everyone's garbage out-
put. Instead of filling up within a
couple of years. as predicted, the
life expectancies of the already
existing landfill sites were abrupt-
ly revised upwards, pushing them
into the aext century.

Something else came along
called Free Trade, which meant
that garbuge wus now an
exportable item,

Bingo!

Overnight, companies that
were paying $152 a tonne to
dump stuff at the government-
owned Canadian landfill sites dis-
covered the beauty of American-
style free enterprise, which would
accept the same amount of
garbage for as low as $8.

The lineup of huge garbage
rigs al the international border
points on the Niagara Peninsula
quickly went from a trickle to a
torrent,

Instead of going to massive
“engineered” (meaning totally
artificial) landfills, Toronto's
garbage — at least the industrial
component — wound up going to

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little privately owned farmyards in
states like New York, Michigan
and even fowa.

Between the sluggish Ontario
economy and the flow of waste
southward, the garbage that every-
one was fearing would become 2
tidal wave has just kind of leaked
away.

And now politicians are saying
Metro's own figures show it
should be possible to recycle this
teduced waste streani by such a
huge margin that the current land-
fills would be adequate for anoth-
er 20 years, never mind needing
any new ones at all.

The bottom line seems to be
that the more it costs to get rid of
garbage, the less garbage thete is.
!.o and behold, financial incen-
tives actually do seem to work,

But here's the other side of the
lesson that Toronto's garbage
experience teaches.

All you have to do to solve the
garbage crisis is make everyone
poor.

So simple! So breathtakingly
effective! So easy!

And that, as far as I can tell, is
what the politicians are working
on now.

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